2006 11 27 at 19:12
· Another in a series of distractions by Brian Forte

According to this site’s sub-title, ‘they distracted us, so now we’re distracting you’. Ignoring the pretensions of the editorial ‘we’, I’m clearly not doing as much distracting as I might. Twelve posts in four months is hardly record-breaking.

And, I think I know what the problem is. It’s not that I’m being distracted any less than usual. Rather the opposite, in fact.

Thanks to web feeds and NetNewsWire I’m bouncing around a wider range of opinion and information sources than ever before. This isn’t an un-alloyed joy.

This morning, for example, I fired up NetNewsWire and, as is my wont, started with the feeds with the fewest un-read items for me to read.

Apropos of nothing more than being subscribed to a feed that linked to it, my next stop was an article by John Cox detailing efforts to understand how the Antikythera Mechanism works. I’ve sounded off on this topic myself and, given that little rant, the portion of Cox’s report that most obviously migrated into medium-term memory is on page 3. It’s here that Cox quotes Michael Edmunds, a professor in the Cardiff University School of Physics and Astronomy, as describing the mechanism as a calculator rather than a computer since:

Before heading off from this corner of the web, however, Gruber pointed me to an article by Niall Kennedy on The Spam Farms of the Social Web. This connects — in my head at least — with the Roettgers and Kinsley articles noted above. Mostly as vague semi-formed thoughts about trust and reputation in different social systems, but it makes a connection nonetheless.

Jumping again, we come to Michael Starr’s article for the New York Post on a L&O CI episode described as “‘pre-ripping’ from the headlines,” by L&O CI executive producer/head writer Warren Leight. Some interesting stuff here about US law and cyberspace being out of sync with each other. Starr doesn’t mention other jurisdictions in the article but I’d be surprised if any legal system is on top of the questions being posed by this episode.

I’d say there’s a story to be told about this disparity but, this is already a reference regarding an article about a story being told about this disparity. Suggesting there might be other stories to be told on this front (even if there are) is a little too meta-narrative even for me.

Chilton’s post isn’t much more than an extensive quote from a Washington Post article on the Diamond trade between Dubai and Israel but most of the people adding comments to the quotage are at least pragmatic enough to argue for getting along as a preferred alternative to the current mess.

The trade between Dubai and Israel is breaking down barriers of fear and mistrust because the trade is fair, the people involved are being paid decently and their working environments are clean and healthy. Insisting on just labour practices, decent environmental standards and fair trading terms for the African diamond industry should be an automatic extension of the hope we garner from the Israel/Dubai contacts.

Meandering along, my next click takes me to Joel [no surname] and his Far Outliers. Joel’s habit of quoting multiple paragraphs from books in print has lead me to spend money I probably shouldn’t have.